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.Some people appear to find a belief in  natural differencesbetween women and men reassuring.I can understand that,because those differences can be enormously frustrating, and ifthey are  natural then there is a sense that they cannot be helpedand therefore we might be able to move towards a sense of calmacceptance.The alternative  believing that those differences arefundamentally socially created  implies that we all have muchmore responsibility for dealing with those frustrations.But soci-ologists are not suggesting that it is up to individuals to constructgender differently.It is not that easy, because no one sat downround a table and said:  Let s organize society along gendered linesand here s how we re going to do it. Society is heavily organizedalong gendered lines, from games at school to jobs to who cleansthe toilet.However, the social construction of gender is full ofcontradictions, disagreements and confusions.How am I sup-posed to do femininity? I could doll myself up and wear high heelsbut someone is likely to think I look vulgar.The point is that if136 CONCLUSIONgender is socially constructed and not everyone knows or agreesexactly what it is, there are spaces and possibilities.This doesn thave to be how it is  gender is open to change, it could be madeless frustrating.There are already, as we have seen, a range of ways in whichgender is learned and practised in everyday life.There are normsand rules and scripts that set out the most socially favoured waysof doing gender.These shift and change throughout history andfrom one culture or social group to another.When I was youngdoctors were rarely women, now they often are.Using moisturizeror taking an interest in clothes does not now automatically lead toa man being identified as gay.It is not a case of  anything goes there are dominant patterns to how we learn femininity andmasculinity, and early socialization is powerful in making girlsgirly and boys boyish.This does not mean that it is all mummy sfault.Parents do not live in a bubble with their children, andextended families, nurseries, schools, workplaces and the mediaare other sources of gender socialization.These communicate arange of sometimes conflicting ideas about how to do gender, sochildren do have a somewhat active part in learning gender in thatthere are choices to be made between the possibilities available.However, symbolic interactionists go further in that they suggestthat gender is something we constantly have to learn and practisethroughout our lives.We are always working at trying to get it right.We continue to learn and do gender, according to thisperspective, in interaction with others.However, there are thosewho suggest that saying that we  do gender puts too muchemphasis on individuals ability to choose.The third bullet point touches on an ongoing debate withinsociology about the extent to which our lives are governed by theway society is organized (structure) and how much power we haveto choose (agency).Symbolic interactionists may veer a littletowards the agency side of this debate, but they do think that thereare structures, even at the level of everyday life, that constrainhow gender is done.There are  scripts that set out  normalCONCLUSION 137expectations about doing gender in various social situations fromworkplaces to parties to intimate relationships.People can play outthose scripts with some variations.For example, almost all theknowledge I had of how to lecture sociology when I became anacademic, was from being lectured to by men.There were fewwomen academics when I was studying.Doing lecturing wastherefore muddled up with doing masculinity for me.It took me awhile to figure out how to be a woman lecturer, and I think I stillsometimes rub my chin thoughtfully as though I have a beard.And even if I have varied the script for that situation, sometimesothers  do my gender for me in those interactions, in ways I maynot like.For example, when I was younger I once got someobscene comments about my breasts on student evaluation forms.I thought I was being feminine yet scholarly, but a few (male?)students were doing my gender by sexually objectifying me.Maybe this made it less threatening for them dealing with a youngwoman lecturer, when most gender scripts encourage women toplay down their intelligence and play up men s.The point is thatthere are limits to freely doing gender however we wish becausegender is also done to us by others.Sitting alone, thinking aboutnothing in particular it may be possible that we sometimes  forgetabout our gender.However, in interaction we are liable to bereminded.Butler argues that gender fundamentally creates indi-viduals according to current norms.It is not that gender is anaspect of who we are, but that gender is the main system throughwhich social beings are produced.Gender is not simply done by usor to us, but it does us.Yet it never does us completely.The normscan only be approximated, so each gendered individual in imitat-ing the norms does so slightly differently.Gender is not an actualproperty that individual women share and men have in common,but an illusion or a masquerade around which only certain ways ofbeing human are possible.Every human being is understood ingendered terms, but almost always they are somehow not feminineenough or too masculine, and so on.This means that what itmeans to be gendered is never fixed, that we can never get it  right.138 CONCLUSIONAll that is certain is that being feminine means not beingmasculine, and vice versa.However, in our everyday lives we are allaware that women can sometimes be considered masculine andmen feminine.This troubles the gender system and, if the bound-ary between feminine and masculine can be blurred, then thatsystem can become less constraining.As it stands, the binary opposition between feminine andmasculine creates a gender system that perpetuates inequalities.The male-dominated societies in which we live tend to privilegemen and disadvantage women.The problem is that  feminineand  masculine are not considered equal opposites.Whatever ismasculine at various different times and in different places is ratedsuperior to what is feminine.Maleness and masculinity tend tocarry with them greater social rewards: more money, more power,more prestige.Not all men share equally in these rewards, and notall women are equally excluded.There are other inequalities in thedividing up of social goodies around class, race/ethnicity, age, dis-ability and sexuality [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]